Chase the Chuck Wagon (Atari 2600)

Chase the Chuck Wagon is one of the earliest instances of a blatant advergame, that being a video game developed more to promote a product or company than stand alone as an enjoyable video game experience. By mailing in proofs of purchase from Purina Chuck Wagon dog food, you used to be able to get an Atari game based on the Chase the Chuck Wagon ad campaign from the 1970s. In those commercials, a miniature chuck wagon would guide the dog over to where the dog food was kept, so that premise was loosely adapted into a video game that was quickly developed in three days as a way to capitalize on the fledgling home console gaming market, and in the video game world, a rushed creation rarely ever pays off in regards to the product’s quality.

Chase the Chuck Wagon, despite its name, is not about chasing a chuck wagon. Instead, a chuck wagon sits at the end of one of four mazes, the player needing to guide a white dog through these mazes to reach the dog food carrying covered wagon. Each of the four mazes are symmetrical and not really too difficult to figure out at a glance, meaning that escaping is less a question of finding your way through than it is one of moving through it before a timer counts down to zero. Unfortunately, the little dog you control isn’t the best shape for navigating these mazes, often being just as big as the gap between walls. In a more open stretch he’s easy enough to move, but when passing through small openings, the dog has a nasty habit of getting stuck to the walls, the player having to urge him off the wall with some forceful joystick pushing. Awkwardly trying to fit through these holes can waste a bit of your time, which can be a major concern if you choose the harder of two time settings. Chase the Chuck Wagon can be played with either a 30 second level timer or a 60 second level timer, and the 60 second level timer is certainly recommended. Besides the issues with getting stuck on walls, the real reason you should stick to 60 is because of the random factors that are the other characters stuck in the chuck wagon’s maze.

There are two enemy types to worry about in Chase the Chuck Wagon, each affecting play in a different way. The dog catcher is actually the less concerning of the two since his movements are easy to spot and can be avoided in most maze runs. The dog catcher will spawn in on one side of the maze, meaning that at the start, the way you go will pretty much be determined by which side does not have the dog catcher. He does wander around randomly though and can put himself in your path if your luck is bad, but most of the time he sticks to his side of the maze. He can kill you in one hit though, and your dog only has three lives to lose before your run through the same repeating four mazes comes to an end. The bigger concern while trying to get to the chuck wagon comes in the form of some bouncing objects that completely ignore the maze walls as they fly around the screen. Whether it’s taken the form of a dog, a bone, or what I have to guess is a tornado of dog food, this enemy will ricochet around, growing faster and faster as the timer counts down, and while it won’t kill you if it touches you, it will freeze you for a short period during which the dog catcher might catch up to you, but the more likely outcome is that the bouncing baddie will bounce back and hit you again, freezing you in place over and over as you’re forced to watch your dog stand in place and take the repeated blows. In a 30 second run, you can be hit by the bouncing enemy over and over and never really have the chance to escape, so at least in the 60 second version you might have a chance to eventually regain control and continue your run to the exit.

The four maze designs aren’t really interesting either. Besides the fact that their paths to the exit are pretty easy to spot immediately, most of their design is wasted since there are two optimal ways to the exit, those being the right and left versions of an identical path. Anything more is just wasting time exploring obvious dead ends or longer paths that don’t really help you with your escape, and if you think they might be useful for escaping the bouncing enemy, these paths don’t really offer any more space to move. Visually, the first three mazes at least look a bit interesting before you notice their designs prioritized looking neat instead of enhancing play, but the final maze before the set repeats itself doesn’t really hit either mark. The fourth maze is a series of boxes with a single opening, the player starting in the smallest one and gradually working their way out of increasingly larger ones. This is the most challenging maze because of this, the dog catcher actually having a small chance of getting in your way at the start and the limited design making it hard to avoid the increasingly fast ricocheting baddie. However, the movement through this maze is usually a slow obvious walk, one that barely squeaks by in 30 seconds if you avoid being touched entirely.

After each maze is completed, the dog is taken to a dark screen where the chuck wagon will drop a bowl of dog food from above, the player needing to press the button at the right time to grab the bowl. If you don’t press a button the bowl will drop again, but once you make your attempt, you either win or lose depending on if the bowl was across from your dog’s standing position. Each time you visit this bonus game, the bowl gets faster, making it a bit harder to press the button at the appropriate time to snag it. Here is where you’ll earn most of your points, the game being high score focused even though you can’t see your points during a regular maze level. Finishing a maze faster gives you points as well, and if you grab the dog bowls right, getting a pretty big score isn’t too difficult. Ease doesn’t equal enjoyability here though. If anything, the fact most your points come mostly from a timed button press trivializes the bulk of the game’s content and its more challenging maze segments, although most of that challenge just comes from avoiding enemies that might randomly line up to make victory that round impossible.

THE VERDICT: The main problem with Chase the Chuck Wagon is how random success can be and how boring it is to succeed when random factors aren’t messing you up. The four maze designs essentially have one path to take to the exit as determined by where the dog catcher is, and the bouncing enemy can move too fast for you to dodge at times, leading to the timer ticking down while your dog is stunned. Even moving through the maze unopposed has some unintentional issues like getting stuck on walls, meaning the only area of the game that really works consistently and as intended is the simple dog food catching bonus game between stages. Too much of the game boils down to doing the same exact thing over and over and hoping it doesn’t decide you will lose this round, making it feel like you have little control over whether or not this dog gets to the chuck wagon at the end of the bland mazes.

And so, I give Chase the Chuck Wagon for the Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. If you remove the bouncing enemy from Chase the Chuck Wagon, oddly enough, it might make the game even worse. While it is the random factor that might end your run outside your control, without it, the slight bit of thought put into your movement would disappear. It’s something to dodge as you take the same few paths through what is a bland, straightforward maze game, so even though getting repeatedly stunned by it feels aggravating and diminishes the urge to push for a high score, without it, the game would simply be too easy and barely put up any resistance to your straightforward advance. At worst, all you’d really have to worry about would be those annoying gaps where the dog gets stuck on the wall. The bouncing enemy is pretty much a flawed design for a good idea, but Chase the Chuck Wagon would still need more than just fixing that to escape its overly simplistic and repetitive mazes.

Like many advergames, I wanted it to be good just because these are such fascinating parts of the video game world, but Chase the Chuck Wagon really didn’t have much hope in that regard. A rushed development lead to many issues being missed, but while it may not be a very enjoyable game to play, it’s odd creation does serve at least as a fun bit of gaming history.